Posts tagged ‘Jack Williamson’

Fred’s death was reported and mourned all over the world. Here are excerpts from just a small selection of the remembrances from fans, friends and the media.

“Grand master passes through the final Gateway.” —Simon Sharwood, The Register.

“On Monday, September 2nd, 2013, one of the last remaining great figures in the science fiction genre passed away. Frederik Pohl was 93 years old, with a long and distinguished career writing, selling and editing science-fiction stories.” —Andrew Liptak, Kirkus Reviews.

“Like some magnificent sequoia, he was both a vibrant, majestic, respirating presence and a token of a distant, almost unimaginable past. He was given a Grandmaster Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America twenty years ago, but that tribute hardly begins to do justice to his immense accomplishments.” —Paul Di Filippo, Barnes and Noble Review.

“Frederik George Pohl, Jr. (Nov. 26, 1919 – Sept. 2, 2013) was almost a living artifact of a bygone era in science fiction, as well as one of the genre’s most fertile and perennially refreshed talents. Born in the immediate aftermath of World War I, he died in the epoch of Google Glass and the Large Hadron Collider, without ever losing his imaginative spontaneity or intellectual curiosity, or his ability to upset and disturb the genre consensus.” —Paul St John Mackintosh, TeleRead.

“Frederik Pohl was a science-fiction author of extraordinary longevity and accomplishment. In hundreds of stories between 1940 and 2010, and dozens of longer works from 1953, he became the sharpest and most precise satirist in the science-fiction world. Kurt Vonnegut may have created greater myths of the awfulness of America, and Philip K Dick may have had a profounder understanding of the human costs of living in a unreal world; but Pohl — from experience garnered in the field of advertising — knew exactly how to describe the consumerist world that began to come into being after the Second World War.” —John Clute, The Independent (UK).

“In all, he published more than 60 novels. His most lauded effort was Jem: The Making of a Utopia (1979), which remains the only science fiction title to have won the National Book Award.” —The Independent (Eire).

“Described as prickly and stubborn (he was married five times and divorced four), Pohl resisted the Internet for years, according to family and friends, but in 2009 launched a blog called ‘The Way the Future Blogs.’ Like much of his writing throughout his life, it was funny, skeptical and perceptive and it won a Hugo Award.” —Ben Steelman, Star News Online.

“A stickler for detail, Pohl was determined to get as much science correct as possible in his books. His research took him all over the world and he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2004, when he published the final novel in the Heechee saga, he apologised to his readers for having suggested, in Gateway, that aliens might have taken refuge in a black hole. With the physics of black holes having been more fully understood in the intervening years, Pohl acknowledged that nothing and no one could exist within a black hole.” —The Telegraph.

Where we left off:MidAmeriCon, August 1976 — As I gave her a foot rub, Dr. Hull said, “I forgot to ask you. Are you married, Frederik?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I am, at least for the next, let me see, four months. After that, we’ll see.”

She didn’t respond to that in words, just waited me out. I gave in to her silence. “Carol and I have been married for almost twenty-five years,” I told her.

She waited me out some more, so I gave her the hard part: “But all she’s willing to guarantee right now is, we’ll stay married right up till New Year’s Day. Then we sit down together and decide if we want to stay married for life, or—”

She didn’t stop outwaiting me, just reached up for the hot coffeepot and refilled our cups.

“Or not,” I said. “See, this was happening on this last New Year’s Day, when we were making jokey resolutions. Only when we started making resolutions about staying married, it stopped being a joke. Shall we hit the SFWA room party now?”

We hit it, and once we got past the guardian at the gate she didn’t need any further help from me. Jack Williamson and a few other old-timers were looking at some foreign sf magazines near the door, and when she caught sight of him and started toward him, he gave her a big “Hello.” Turned out they had met at some Midwest thing a year or so before.

I spent the next half hour talking SFWA business with whoever happened by, and just when I was thinking of telling her I needed to leave, she came over to me to say she had to get up in the morning but Jack’s room was on the same floor as hers in that other hotel, and he had offered to walk her home.

“And he promised to let me in here again, so I won’t need to bother you,” she said, and thanked me and was gone.

On a day late in August, in the year of 1976, I was sitting at my ease in a very comfortable first-class seat in a four-engined jet that was just about to land at my favorite airport in the world. I was sipping on a nearly empty glass of Hires root beer, which the stew had already replenished for me twice, and I was prepared to swallow what remained in the glass as soon as the captain ordered us to get ready for landing. I was employed in a well-paid job as the science-fiction editor for Bantam Books, and I confidently expected to be offered a package including quite a lot more money as soon as I got around to sitting down with my boss and talking about that subject. It won’t be much of a surprise to you if I mention that I was feeling good.

I might have been feeling even better if I had known one important fact, namely that this was the day when I would make the best decision of my life, but that information had not yet been revealed to me. The only “best” that I was aware of in my mind was the one that related to the airport we were approaching, Kansas City Intercontinental.

Now, I emphasize right away that what I’m talking about is the airport itself, not about the cities it served. No one has ever dreamed of two enchanted weeks of vacationing either in Kansas City, Kansas, or in the other Kansas City. You know, the one that couldn’t think of a decent name of their own, so they simply swiped the name of their next door neighbor.

KCI’s superlative qualities had nothing to do with the cities it served. It’s the design of the airport itself that is the marvel. You see, when your plane lands, it will taxi to its own gate, set into the outer perimeter of one of the three great circles that hold all the jet gates in the airport. The aircraft door opens, freeing you to go up the short ramp to the walkway that surrounds the entire circle of gates.

A half-dozen or so more steps take you to the baggage claim for your suitcase. It is probably there already, waiting for you before you get there, because now it is only a couple of yards from the place where it rode out the flight, which was in the baggage compartment of your jet, and that other place where it is now, which is firmly on the solid ground of the airport’s baggage claim. You never have to search for your bag in a mass of other bags originating from Buffalo and Barcelona and Bujumbura, either. None of those bags was ever aboard this flight. (Well, I mean, unless that’s where you’re originating from yourself.) Then, bags in hand, you take ten or a dozen steps more and you’re out in the open air, standing at the curb of the outermost strip of the great wheel, waving at a cab which is slowly cruising somewhere along the wheel, and will shortly pick you up right where you stand. Or, if what you want to board instead of a cab is the bus that takes you to the parking lot, or to car rentals, or some other destination, those will also be cruising the great wheel and they will pick you up in minutes. That takes very little more effort to summon, and certainly no more walking than the cab. What more can you ask?

Oh, I know what you might ask to make your trip more enjoyable still. You might ask for it to be at some destination other than one of the twin Kansas Cities, and there, I must confess, I have not been entirely frank with you.

I admit I wasn’t happy just about going to either of the Kansas Cities in itself. That city is — either of those cities is — hardly anyone’s favorite gotta-go-there destination for tourism. What elevated my mood, when it wasn’t depressing it, was what I would be doing when I got there, which was attending the annual World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, which had been my custom for most of the years since 1939. (That 1939 one was the first Worldcon of all, the one that I and a few other Futurians were unjustly kicked out of. If you want more details on this event, simply pick up your treasured copy of The Way the Future Was and turn to page 76.) Anyway, that fannish rumble was long ago. Hardly anyone who was involved is still alive. Or cares.)

For me, and for my nearest and dearest, the Worldcons were the places we most looked forward to visiting each year, Sometimes they were held at places that we loved to visit anyway — London, Toronto, a couple of American cities where we had well-loved but not frequently visited friends and relatives. The specific city didn’t all that much matter, though. It was the con itself that was the attraction, the place where we could count on getting together with good friends that we didn’t see every day, because they lived so ridiculously far away — like Patrice Duvic from France, and Sashiko and Takumi Shibano from Japan, and Yuli Kagarlitsky from what was then still called the Soviet Union, and batches of others from Italy and the UK and Sweden and Spain and Brazil, and, of course, from many of the remoter parts of the U.S.A. itself as well.

So what I was really looking forward to was the people who comprised the con itself. That is, I was until I got to my hotel.

When the great world of non-English-speaking science fiction fans began to flex their young muscles and develop their own brand-new sorts of clubs and cons there was o way to slow them down. So it was no surprise to us Americans that, when there sprang into life an annual science fiction film festival, it was on the other side of an ocean, in a city called Trieste.

When some fan asked what country it was in, some wise guy — it may have been me — asked, “What country was it in when?” Because in the memory of living people — -that is, of people who were living in the 1960s — Trieste had alternately been Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslavian or Italian. And that doesn’t count those periods when the wars that changed things were over, but the old men with the chalk in their hands hadn’t quite finished drawing those map lines that dictated who would live where, and what they. would call themselves.

By the time Trieste hosted Il Festivale di Fantascienza, though, it was irrevocably (they said) Italian, and that’s what got us there. We were sitting on our porch in Red Bank, New Jersey, my then wife Carol and I, me reading the final pages of my latest collaboration with Jack Williamson, the Old Master himself, and Carol studying a map of eastern Europe.

I had just finished the final pages, having made only a handful of penciled improvements, none that required retyping whole pages, which meant all I had to do just then was put it in the mail for a final lookover by Jack. Unless he found something he wanted me to do over, which he almost never did, the next thing I would have to do with that one would be to deposit the check for the on-delivery half of my part of the advance when it turned up in the day’s mail.

That’s when Carol said, “Ðubrovnik” pronouncing the name as though enjoying the flavor of it.

What I said then was. “What?” I don’t know exactly what thoughts had been floating around my easily distracted mind at that time, but I was sure that they had nothing to do with towns with funny names..

She filled me in. “I said, ‘Dubrovnik,’ because I always said I wanted to visit some place that had a name I couldn’t pronounce.”

I reminded her that she had just pronounced it, and she shook her head at me. “How do I know I pronounced it right? Anyway, that’s not the important part. Look on the map here. Here’s this Dubrovnik place, and it’s right down the coast from that sci-fi film thing you said you wanted to go to, the one in Treesty.”

“There isn’t any such place as Treesty,” I informed, “The Film Festival is in Tree-esty. And all I said was maybe one of these years we might take a look — ”

“Well, what’s wrong with this year? You said you wanted to go there.. And just the other day, Mother was asking if we were going to want her to mind the kids while we went somewhere. I told her I’d ask you, so now I’m asking.”

I said, “Hum.” That was my coded expression for meaning, Let me mull this over in my mind, because Carol had a point. Back in those wartime days when my personal travel agent had been the U.S. Air Force, they had shipped me all over the map of Italy, except for two areas they somehow missed. One of them was Sicily, way down at the farthest south. The other, in the farthest north, was that spur of land at the top of the Adriatic Sea that held Trieste. The opportunity to see more of a country I had come to love simply couldn’t be passed up. So we made our plans, Carol and I, and we checked to see that our passports were up to date and that Carol’s mother, Carolie Ulf, was still cheerful about supervising the youngest children for two or three weeks, the two older ones being off at school,.

And next thing you know, our Alitalia jet was touching down at Milan’s airport and we were shifting our not inconsiderable baggage into the trunk of a Hertz car and heading east.

When Anne McCaffrey died, I lost — in fact, we all lost — a kind, generous and undemanding friend, and it took some of the holiday spirit out of the Christmas-New Years time.

It also led me to think about the general question of death, as presented in the cases of three old friends. Annie died of a massive stroke as she was being helped into her wheelchair; it was over at once. Jack Williamson died after a period of increasing failures of his bodily organs. These had the effect of making his memory less sure and his response time increasingly slowed, until he was almost incapable of conversation. Isaac Asimov, as I understand it, was physically failing but quite aware of what was going on almost to the very end.

There are, of course, many other ways of dying, most of which are a good deal worse than any of these. But if your time came tomorrow and you had your choice of these three ways of doing it, Annie’s, Jack’s or Isaac’s, which would you pick, and why?

I don’t remember exactly when I first met Martin Harry Greenberg, who died on July 2nd after a series of debilitating health problems. Whenever it was, it was a long time ago, maybe in the ’60s, but I do remember the circumstances. I had received a letter from him — the world hadn’t yet got around to emails — inviting me to speak at something called Florida International University, whatever that was. The invitation had come with an offer of a modest honorarium and I had accepted it.

I didn’t do it for the money. I did it for two reasons. These were the years when schools all over the country were beginning to offer courses in science fiction, a development which I approved of and did my best to encourage. And the other and perhaps more important reason was that I really liked talking to college audiences. In six or seven years of speaking at college dates there was only one I wished I had never heard of — and that one was just a couple of days before; I had moved on to the University of Wisconsin, where I had one of my most memorable speaking engagements ever.

I was picked up at the Miami airport by Marty in a car with a Florida International paint job, driven by a slim and youthful-looking young man. There were a couple words of introduction as I got in, but I caught nothing but the name — Joe Olander — being more concentrated on trying to get the car door closed before some speeding taxicab made off with it. The driver had his own priorities, trying to avoid some other taxi’s attempts to remove a fender, so he didn’t take much part in the early parts of the conversation between me and Marty. I approved of the fact that he was concentrating on the task of getting us safely out of the airport.

Then, as we were securely on “Alligator Alley,” the highway across Florida’s southern tip, he began adding, over his shoulder, comments of his own to Marty’s quick course in the history and attributes of FIU.

Marty didn’t seem to mind, or even to think it strange that a car driver should say things like “Marty and I have been scheming for a long time to add a course in science fiction.” That struck me as a bit odd, if praiseworthily democratic on Marty’s part, until a photograph in one of the bits of paper Marty was handing me caught my eye. The photo was of our driver, and the caption under it was, “Vice President of Florida International University, Dr. Joseph D. Olander.”

That put a quite different complexion on some of the things both Dr. Greenberg and Dr. Olander had been saying. I listened quite a lot more attentively as they explained some of the details of what they haad in mind. My speaking invitation, in their plan, was not merely a one-night stand but — they hoped — simply the first step in their campaign for much bigger things. First was to be the addition of a credit course in science fiction to the curriculum, and then perhaps a year or two later — and this made me sit up straight — they planned on hiring a science-fiction author as a Writer-in-Residence at FIU. Unspoken but clearly implied was the item that their number one choice on their list for the job was me.